News Feeds

All About Jazz is celebrating Clark Terry's birthday today!
Clark Terry\'s career in jazz spans more than sixty years. He is a world-class trumpeter, flugelhornist, educator, and NEA Jazz Master. He performed for seven U.S. Presidents, and was a Jazz Ambassador for State Department tours in the Middle East and Africa. More than fifty jazz festivals in all seven continents still feature him. He received a Grammy Award, two Grammy certificates, three Grammy nominations... Read more...

Back in the early 1980s, I'd head down to Barry Harris's Jazz Cultural Theater on New York's Eighth Avenue in the 20s to hear Jaki Byard and the Apollo Stompers. As I recall, you never knew who you'd see in the band. There often were guys in the trumpet section who played Broadway shows. But the biggest surprise of all was hearing Byard play the piano. There was a lot of abstraction in his attack, but there always was a traditional jazz core. Byard was an exceptional technician, a rambunctiously creative player and a mischief-maker on the keyboards. In some ways, his artistry was a fascinating mash of Theloious Monk, Charles Mingus and Erroll Garner. All were widely admired players, but all brought a vivid sense of humor to the fore...

Hypebot contributor Kyle Bylin writes about the rise of midsize cities. He believes these places are the next platforms for music ideas. Local residents are choosing to build their businesses where they live rather than relocating to pursue their dreams. These small businesses, fused with state personality and pride, are poised to reshape the music landscape in the coming decades...

It appears as though an ever increasing number of bands and artists are avoiding traditional record label and instead taking the indie path, sometimes by choice and sometimes because of difficulty of signing with a major label. Whatever the reason, indie labels are soon set to contribute to 40% of the global music economy, with no sign of slowing down...

Saxophonist/composer Benjamin Boone's The Poetry of Jazz, a collaboration with the late U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine, was recognized as a milestone spoken word/jazz project immediately upon its release last March. Praised in leading musical and literary publications, featured on NPR's All Things Considered, and voted the #3 Jazz Album of 2018 in DownBeat's annual Readers Poll, The Poetry of Jazz established Boone as one of the most captivating and compelling voices among contemporary artists exploring the intersections between poetry and jazz...

e: Village Vanguard events are once again available through the Jazz Near You platform which includes nyc.jazznearyou.com, the weekly Jazz Near You NYC email and the Jazz Near You app.
Thanks in part to a collaboration with e: SquadUP, new Village Vanguard events are imported nightly making Jazz Near You home to all Vanguard events moving forward...

All About Jazz is celebrating Mark Elf's birthday today!
Mark Elf has been on the Jazz scene for over 35 years. He was born in Queens, New York in 1949 and started playing the Guitar at the age of 11. He has played and or recorded with the Jazz Giants: Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, Jimmy Heath and the Heath Bros., Wynton Marsalis and Jon Hendricks just to name a few. His first professional Jazz performance occurred around 1971 as a sideman at the Club Barron in Harlem... Read more...

A Gal in Calico was written by Leo Robin and Arthur Schwartz for a rather dumb film from Warner Bros. called The Time, the Place and the Girl. Released the day after Christmas in 1946, the B-movie was a post-war good-time jubilee featuring a dopey plot and a mess of stage talent and dance numbers. But nestled within the movie mess was a Western scene with lariat twirlers. The Oklahoma-like production needed a song, so Robin and Schwartz wrote A Gal in Calico...

Metadata (aka data about data) has become a huge part of achieving musical success in the digital age. So huge, in fact, that to ignore it, or to have incorrect metadata, can ruin your chances of keeping your head above water in the streaming era.
By Chris Robley of CD Baby from the DIY Musician blog...

CD Baby's DIY Musician Conference is moving from Nashville to Austin " to connect with a fresh community of musicians in another deeply musical city." Presentations, workshops, mentoring, jam rooms and more will be held at the downtown Hilton August 16-18, 2019.
'CD Baby pays close attention to what our artists need,' explains Kevin Breuner of CD Baby. 'We know they are often hungry for a real plan of action, for helpful advice and encouragement, not for another panel on abstract business issues facing major labels...

While emails certainly do a lot for driving ticket sales, it's easy to wonder if they could be doing more, and artists frequently vacillate between sending too few emails, and bombarding their market base and over-saturating them. Here we look at new data on how to get it right.
Guest post by Rachel Grate of Eventbrite...

The Moderns vol.2 explores the world's great avant-garde artists.
BADD PRESS announces the launch of The Moderns vol. 2, the second installment of a series dedicated to the world's great avant-garde artists. Featuring more than 200 reviews and interviews, the book introduces readers to established and emerging music leaders from around the world...

All About Jazz is celebrating Tony Williams' birthday today!
Born in Chicago and growing up in Boston, Williams began studies with master drummer Alan Dawson at an early age and began playing professionally at the age of 13 with saxophonist Sam Rivers. Jackie McLean hired Williams at 16. At 17 Williams found considerable fame with Miles Davis, joining a group that was later dubbed Davis\'s "Second Great Quintet." His first album as a leader... Read more...

Part of the main ethos behind SoundCloud which allows it to function is the idea of its users sharing and engaging with each other not just on a musical level, but also sharing common interests and ideas. As an artist, this can make for the perfect environment in which to build and grow a community of both fans and fellow creators...

In this second in a multi-part series exploring some of the less well known publishing agreements in the music industry, Justin Jacobson delves into the nitty gritty of sub-publishing agreement and what its implications are for an artist.
Guest post by Justin Jacobson, Esq. of the TuneCore Blog
This is the second in a two-part installment reviewing different types of publishing agreements. To catch up on Part 1, click here...

The late 1950s and the 1960s were fertile years in the development of the hard-bop style. That incubation was so dominated by the players of one jazz record label that it has become known as The Blue Note Era because the Blue Note label's bands and future bandleaders had an indelible impact on modern jazz...

Critically acclaimed guitar-driven instrumental power jazz rock trio Eddie Arjun (formally known as ARJUN) release their 5th album, Transition (Pheromone Records), following the success of their album Gravity. Transition continues the artistic evolution of one of New York City's most exciting and original bands, featuring the masterful guitar work and deeply expressive compositions of Eddie Arjun Peters. Transition is an outstanding continuation of Eddie Arjun's bold sound and style, rooted in carefully crafted melodies which tell resonant stories without words...

All About Jazz is celebrating McCoy Tyner's birthday today!
It is not an overstatement to say that modern jazz has been shaped by the music of McCoy Tyner. His blues- based piano style, replete with sophisticated chords and an explosively percussive left hand has transcended conventional styles to become one of the most identifiable sounds in improvised music. His harmonic contributions and dramatic rhythmic devices form the vocabulary of a majority of jazz pianists... Read more...

Kristin Korb, That Time Of Year (Storyville)
Winter holiday albums began showing up in the <Rifftides mailbox well before Thanksgiving. They're still coming. It's time to call some of them to your attention.
From her assertive opening bass statement, Kristin Korb, her trio and an intriguing guest soloist set a high standard for 2018 holiday jazz. Their album is more than an hour of classic songs balanced with less familiar ones. As ever in her bass playing, Ms. Korb's Ray Brown lineage is apparent as she provides the trio's strongly felt and heard foundation. She tempers the softness of her singing with phrasing and bluesy note treatments that emphasize the extent of her immersion in the modern jazz tradition. Nowhere are those attributes more evident than in 'Santa Baby,' the sultry song that Eartha Kitt made a hit in the early 1950s. For this album Ms. Korb adds another young Dane to her established trio with pianist Magnus Hjorth and drummer Snorre Kirk. Mathias Heise's harmonica virtuosity is leading jazz observers in Europe and elsewhere to mention him as a successor to the late Toots Thielemans. His work with the group he calls the Mathias Heise Quadrillion have come in for extensive critical praise...

Ira Gitler turned me on to Italian jazz pianist Roberto Magris in 2008. Roberto's superb album, Il Bello Del Jazz, accompanying alto saxophonist Herb Geller, had just reached the U.S. after being released in Italy in 2006. Over the years, Roberto and I have remained in touch, with Roberto sending along his latest releases. All have been superb, especially his Lee Morgan Rewind Vols. 1 and 2...